This is the story of the British Pattern 14 Enfield, which turns out to be a story that's more important for the US than for the United Kingdom.
Not that its as unimportant for the UK as some would have it. It was issued on the front lines early i the war and, as it was a more accurate rifle than the SMLE, it was used, with telescopic sight, as a sniper rifle by the British during the Great War. It would not reprise that role in World War Two in the British Army, but it did in the Australian Army.
Thursday, May 11, 2017
The British Pattern 13 Enfield
This is part of a series, which will lead up to the M1917 Enfield, whose adoption date this is. You'll have to read the later post for the story of the "American" Enfield.
The British Patter 13 Enfield.
It never served, but it darned near did.
The British Patter 13 Enfield.
It never served, but it darned near did.
Wednesday, May 10, 2017
John J. Pershing informed he is to lead American troops in France.
I've backed off nearly daily entries from 1917 here, now that we no longer have the Punitive Expedition to follow, and returned more of the traditional pace and focus of the blog, but there are exceptions and today is one.
On this day, in 1917, John J. Pershing, recently promoted to Major General, was informed by Secretary of War Newton Baker that he was to lead the American expeditionary force in France.
This now seems all rather anticlimactic, as if the appointment of Pershing was inevitable, and perhaps it was, but he was not the only possible choice and his selection involved some drama, to some extent. Pershing was then 56 years old, an age that would have put him in the upper age bracket for a senior office during World War Two, but not at this time in the context of World War One. Indeed, his rise to Major General had been somewhat unusual in its history and course, as he had earlier been advanced over more senior officers in an era when that was rare, and it is often noted that his marriage to Helen Warren, the daughter of powerful Wyoming Senator Francis E. Warren, certainly did not hurt his career. Often regarded as having reached the pinnacle of his Army career due to "leading" the Army during the Punitive Expedition, he was in fact technically second in command during that event as the commander of the department he was in was Frederick Funston.
Funston is already familiar to readers here as we covered his death back in February. Not really in the best of health in his later years, but still a good five years younger than Pershing, Funston died suddenly only shortly after the Punitive Expedition concluded leaving Pershing his logical successor and the only Army officer then in the public eye to that extent. Indeed, as the United States was progressing towards entering the war it was Funston, a hero of the Spanish American War, who was being considered by the Wilson Administration as the likely leader of a US contingent to Europe. His sudden death meant that his junior, Pershing, took pride of place.
But not without some rivals. Principal among them was Gen. Leonard Wood, a hero of the later stages of the Indian Wars and the Spanish American War who was a protégée of Theodore Roosevelt. Almost the exact same age as Pershing, Wood was backed by Republicans in Congress for the position of commander of the AEF. Not too surprisingly, however, given his close association with Roosevelt, he was not offered the command. Indeed, it was this same week when it became plain that Roosevelt was also not to receive a combat command in the Army, or any role in the Army, for the Great War, to his immense disappointment.
Pershing went on, of course, to command the AEF and to even rise in rank to the second highest, behind only George Washington, rank in the U.S. Army. That alone shows that he was an enormous hero in his era. He lived through World War Two and in fact was frequently visited by generals of that war, many of them having a close military association with him from World War One. His personality dramatically impacted the Army during the Great War, so much so that it was sometimes commented upon to the effect that American troops were all carbon copies of Pershing. Still highly regarded by most (although some have questioned in recent years his view of his black troops) he is far from the household name he once was for the simple reason that World War Two has overshadowed everything associated with World War One.
A Mid Week At Work Query: How did you end up doing what you do? Is it what you expected?
Iris Gaines: You know, I believe we have two lives.The Natural
Roy Hobbs: How... what do you mean?
Iris Gaines: The life we learn with and the life we live with after that.
This past couple of weeks we've posted queries regarding whether your adult occupation, or occupations, match your childhood aspirations. So far, in my case, of the variety of things I've done as an adult, a few did in fact match them.
Which doesn't take us to how we end up doing that thing. Our job, our vocation, our occupation, which even presumes, likely inaccurately, that those things are in fact the same thing.
At some point, at least for most of us, we end up doing something fairly steadily. Not everyone does, of course. Some people drift from job to job, and some people frankly like doing that. I'm occasionally amazed by people who are truly so varied in their talents that they can do that fairly effortlessly.
For most people, however, once they lose a job its a disaster. They have, at some point, little ability to move occupations, which isn't the same as having no ability. Of my close friends I think probably half of them have moved occupations as adults. I definitely have not, but I've been unusually employed in multiple things as well, even while having a main vocation. Still, the more specialized their occupation, and the more training that goes into it, the harder it is for a person to switch away from it even is desperate necessity requires it. A lawyer friend of mine, for example, once observed when he decided to try to leave the law (which he ultimately did, returning to school in his 40s in order to become a teacher. . . his third career) that "lawyers are occupationally illiterate". It isn't just them, if a physician walked into NAPA for example, hoping to pick up a counter job, he'd be unqualified for it.
But, amongst the same group of friends of mine noted above, a bunch of them didn't end up where they started to go.
Of my close high school friends, including myself, none of us did. A friend who started off to be an engineer ended up a restaurateur. One who aspired to be a dentist ended up a very successful electrician. A friend who was hugely musically talented attended a first rate music school but has only played in bands on weekend gigs, basically. He is principally employed as a big IT guy, self taught. And I'm not working as a geologist. Indeed, after I started practicing law the state started licensing geologist and I never took the exam for a license. So I couldn't easily work in that field now if I wished to.
A lifelong friend who wanted to be a marine biologist had to switch gears to obtain a teaching certificate and never found employment in that. He's worked as a chemist for many years.
Looking at my college friends the story is more or less the same. My closet college friend burned out on our mutual geology degrees (a very common story, frankly, and part of the reason I didn't go on to geology grad school) and never completed one final class for his degree. He went on to work in retail for many ears and then switched to school infrastructure. Of the other geology students I knew at the time, four were able to actually find full time work in the field, or closely related ones, and three remain employed in it today. The fourth quit to become a lawyer, something that one of only two of us who graduated with Bachelors degrees and job offers in my class also did, refusing an offer of a job in Australia after his family objected.
Law school, where I ended up, was a sea of altered dreams mixed in with islands of long held aspirations. My closest friend in law school had a history degree but had spent a hitch in the Army as an enlisted man. He nearly returned to that when we were in law school and did go on to a hugely successful career in the Army JAG Corps. A friend of mine from basic training, who was discharged due to shin splints but who managed to get back in, to my surprise, completed a career as an Army officer, something I would never have guessed was a goal of his. One of my better friends in the law started off as a U.S. Army Ranger (indeed two of my friends in the law were Rangers, and the individual mentioned above was in the Special Forces in a reserve unit for a time), then went to school to be a game warden and then switched to geology, a career path that isn't unfamiliar to me. Most of us in law school, of course, did end up lawyers. Its sort of the end of the road in terms of career change.
Indeed, one of the huge lies about law school is that "you can do anything with a law degree". That fable is absolutely true as long as what you want to do with your law degree is practice law, which of course is actually the one and only point in getting a law degree so generally it works out well in terms of finding work with the degree.
Or it did. I read that is no longer true and there are a lot of unemployed or underemployed lawyers.
Anyhow, I think it's interesting that when I talk to people their career paths often aren't what we think they are. We'll often read a trade journal and it'll say something like "Geologist Bob decided to enter the field when, at age 12, he found a triceratops roosting on his parents barn door. . . ." or "When I think back on my career in the law that has lead me to be appointed a United States Supreme Court Justice, I think back warmly on that time my little sister stole my Wheaties and I looked up on how to obtain a Writ of Replevin to get them back. . .I was six". Hmm, probably not. Indeed, many of those folks who obtain real pinnacles in their careers started off somewhere else. The two now passed gentlemen who started the firm where I work now both started off with other career goals, but how many know that? Not many, probably.
I'm' not sure what the point of this really is. Many later career goals do work out. Three of my close friends from my geology days have made careers in that field, or very closely related ones, for decades. Maybe more of the students I knew then are employed in the field other than the one I mentioned above. Most of the engineering students I knew did become employed engineers. More than a few of the people I knew who took up pursuing a teaching degree found work in that, and indeed, at least one of them is retired from it.
So what about you? Did you have career goals, and did you end up where you planned to be?
Tuesday, May 9, 2017
All the further I've managed to get. . .
between chores and the weather.
After work on May 5. Put in all the potatoes. The next day all I did was work around the house on a fencing project. And the day after that completed that, did some 4H leadership stuff, but did manage to complete the last row. Found my hooked up hose was broken and that the rainbird type sprinkler, which admittedly left out all winter long, was no longer functioning (I can never get those to last more than one year).
And then it started raining, again.
So, reds, whites and one row of purples. That's it so far.
Man, it's been wet.
The cell phone outnumbers the landline.
LoC Caption: "The Story of the Telephone. Speeding the spoken word. Scene from the
new American Red Cross motion picture, "Speeding the Spoken Word," in
which the romance of the telephone is graphically portrayed on the
screen". 1920.
The number of mobile-phone users in the U.S. surpassed the number of conventional land-based phone lines in the second half of 2004, the government said Friday.
By the end of the year, there were 181.1 million cellphone subscribers, compared with 177.9 million access lines into U.S. homes and businesses, the Federal Communications Commission said in a biannual report.
Los Angeles Times.
A person has to be careful with statistics as they can lead to incorrect assumptions. For one thing, this may tend to lead to an erroneous assumption that the number of households with landlines is outnumbered by the number with cell phones only, which would be erroneous. For example, our house has a landline, but all three of us who live here have cell phones. In contrast, my son, who is in college, lives in a house in which there are no landlines in use. There might be for internet service, but no actual landline phone.
The point is, however, that sheer number of cell phones doesn't equate with households served only by cell phones, although that day is coming. Indeed, the tyranny of the cell phone is at the point at which a lot of homes have one landline but a lot of cell phones.
Good, bad?
Well, both, I suppose.
FWIW, I'm actually surprised it took this long to reach this point.
Monday, May 8, 2017
The debate on a national health care system. A few random thoughts
Ambulances, Ft. Huachuca, 1918.
I should pay more attention to the debate going on about health care than I do. I really should. It really matters. I've posted on it a few times, but for some reason it just isn't the burning issue for me that it with some.
Which leads me to my first point. There are some pundits out there declaring that the GOP sponsorship of a new bill, repealing the Affordable Health Care Act, means they're doomed in the mid terms as they're hurting their constituency.
The pundits, once again, are delusional.
This entire talking point assumes that the entire nation including the rust belt voters have immersed themselves in the topic of medical provision, concluded that a national health care system is needed, and are now debating the best one, and have concluded that was the ACA. Learning that they personally will loose benefits, they'll become outraged.
Bull.
The debate on health care on the street level isn't about this at all. It's more visceral. And it really deals with how much the government should do. You can have a visceral negative reaction to something that's good for you.
Take Prohibition for example. It was a health care success, benefiting those at the bottom of the economic rung the best. So we kept it, right?
No, we repealed it, and the reason we did is we just didn't like people telling us not to drink. The health care debate is like that.
Which doesn't mean it isn't being treated like the opposite, and doesn't have some of its features. Demonstrating another point. When the government gives out benefits its deuce difficult to take them back, and that is something that really should be taken into account whenever that is done.
Free and reduced school lunches, Federal involvement in pre school education, Medicare, Medicaid and a million other programs are such examples. I'm not saying that they are good or bad. What I'm saying is that whenever these are debated, they're debated in terms of adjustment, not taking away. Because once you give a benefit, it's really hard to take it back, and soon it becomes viewed as a right.
Free and reduced school lunches, and now breakfasts at least here, are a good example. When I was attending school everyone, no matter how poor, had food provided by their parents. If a parent had failed to provide this basic need, they'd have been looked down upon by everyone and they probably would have received a hostile visit from the state. Now, nobody views this in this fashion and its accepted that the local taxpayers will feed the children of those who can't feed their own. Is this bad? I'm not saying that (although there are interesting moral elements of it all the way around). But what I am saying is that good or bad, and in economic times of plenty or lean, it's going to be done. We started doing it, and not doing now seems unthinkable.
Which brings me back to why some folks have true complaints about the Affordable Care Act.
Most people do feel that everyone needs basic medical care. But what does that mean? Democrats, in this debate, like to throw in "Women's Reproductive Health" and indeed there are now quite a few people who feel this is a national right. But what that really means is that the Federal Government is subsidizing sex.
There's something flat out weird about that, but beyond that a lot of people find that when we reach this particular point we are reaching the limits of what they can tolerate under their own belief set, and they'll push back irrespective of what people like David Frum think about it.
To some who hold philosophical ideas about the nature of liberty, this entire concept is truly abhorrent. How can we justify taxing everyone so that some can avoid the natural results of their biological acts? Does this impinge on a concept of individual liberty as it creates universal responsibility for an individual act?
To other social conservatives this is just childish. The basic argument would be "grow up and take care of yourself if you are acting like adults". And there's more than a little to that. If people are adult enough to act like adults in this fashion, well, what happens is their problem, this argument would go.
For fiscal conservatives it couldn't be weirder. Taxing everyone to pay for an individual biological act is bizarre. It would make just as much sense to tax everyone to pay for food for everyone, and indeed it'd make a great deal more sense.
And of course for some its deeply offensive to their religions, and they're put in crisis by such a bill.
Which brings us to this. A lot of "affordable care" isn't medicine, but sociology. When you medicate to prevent the results of a healthy body doing a biological act that's not medicine or it certainly isn't necessary medicine. It's nearly the opposite. And objecting to that makes a lot of sense.
Which, in this particular era, brings us to the topic of how much do we want to cover? Nobody wants the ill to go untreated. But do we extend to the margins of science? Are we going to cover birth control, abortions, cosmetic surgery based on self identity?
If it seems like we haven't really discussed all these things its because, well, we haven't.
And what about costs?
A lot of the reasons that health care is so expensive is that its improved so much over the past half century. But another is that we don't regulate the price of things in our sort of economy. We don't really know why things cost what they do.
But we do know, if we are honest, that a national health care system that actually works, and we aren't there yet, will control costs. People who think otherwise are delusional on this point. No national health care system that includes everyone will function until taxes are levied to pay for it and costs are controlled by the payer. That's a fact. And in that sort of system, the money flowing into medical practices and medical industries will have to ultimately decline massively. And some of this will result in reduced services, probably, and indeed perhaps rationing of one thing or another.
Again, I'm not saying that is good or bad. I'm saying that flat out is. It happens to an extent already as health insurers never pay the full rate of anything, nor do government entities like state run workers compensation systems. But the extent which this would have to occur in a national system is huge.
Which takes me to a prediction.
At the end of the day, in a nation as big and diverse as we've become, but in an era in which medicine is so advanced and so expensive, we're going to end up with some type of single payer system sooner or later. We'll have to. We've started down this road, and that's where we will end up. We're not going back to the pre Affordable Care days, and we're not going to wipe out health insurance and go back to 1939. So we're going forward, and that means sooner or later we're going forward into one system. It might be fifty systems mandated by the Federal government, perhaps with health carriers bidding in, or it might be a giant workers compensation type system. But that's what we'll end up doing. When we get there, there's a good chance that what it provides will be limited by national consensus, or discord. In other words, my guess it'll pay for all emergency medicine, basic treatment, but if you want birth control pills, your hooters enhanced, or an ugly scar across your chest removed, you'll have to pay for that yourself.
Later rather than sooner, but that's my guess, for good or ill.
Dog Pile
Kids play a game, or used to, that was called "dog pile". Basically it involved a group of children jumping piling on one kid in a big pile.What's right isn't always popular, and whats popular isn't always right--Albert Einstein
James Montgomery Flagg illustration for Leslie's Magazine, May 3, 1917. Civilization, which presumably was represented by the Allies, is depict ed about to strike down the German Beast, which is wearing the classic German helmet of the time,and has a turned up Kaiser Wilhelm mustache. This post isn't actually about World War One, but illustrates my point. The German Empire was only marginally less civilized, if at all, than quite a few of the Allied powers of the Great War, and wasn't particularly beastly or uniquely so.
I'm often amazed by the extent to which adults play this game.
Adults, of course, don't recognize that they're doing it. No, not at all. But they do.
Public opinion is the worst of all opinions.--Nicolas Chamfort
Often when they do, they believe that their being pioneering in their views. Not always, but often. You can tell what current social trend of the day has achieved widespread acceptance when everyone, most people, college protestors, and the media, dog pile on whomever holds the opposing view.
Journalist do control public opinion; but it is not contolled by the arguments they publish--it is controlled by teh arguments between the editor and the sub editor, which they do not publish. --G. K. Chesterton.
Now, that means that holding those views involves an element of bravery. It doesn't make those views right, but merely because a majority of people hold the opposing view at any one time doesn't make those views right either.
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.--G. K. Chesterton
In my lifetime, I've seen the public jump on the bandwagon on opinions and movements in a major way, and then back away from them just as strongly.
Nearly everyone was for invading Iraq in the first Gulf War, no matter what they say now. Journals that went after the government for the war later on were enthusiastically for it before the first shot was fired, and on the march to Baghdad there was hardly a dissenting voice.
At the end of the Vietnam War everyone was against it, and all veterans were drug addled baby killing dangers to society. A few years later, the war was simply a mistake (oops) and the veterans were all mistreated heroes.
And so too, I'd note, with big social movements that touch on the very nature of human beings and our natures. Its interesting to watch the consensus move to the point on some things that people can declare the opposing view wrong in every way and still think themselves trendy, which in fact the opposite is the case. None of that, however, changes the nature of nature, including our own natures. Nature doesn't care much about our opinions.
People can tell you to keep your mouth shut, but that doesn't stop you from having your own opinion.--Anne Frank
Capitalists
Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.
GK Chesterton
Sunday, May 7, 2017
Seems odd
The French have their national elections on Sunday, and are having one today.
That seems odd for some reason.
That seems odd for some reason.
Hate and Love
There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.
GK Chesterton
GK Chesterton
Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Unidentified, Medicine Bow Wyoming
Churches of the West: Unidentified, Medicine Bow Wyoming:
This is an old Prairie Gothic style church in Medicine Bow, Wyoming, but other than that, I don't know anything about it.
This is an old Prairie Gothic style church in Medicine Bow, Wyoming, but other than that, I don't know anything about it.
Saturday, May 6, 2017
Eternal rebels
He is a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of a conservative.
GK Chesterton
GK Chesterton
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